‘My Single True Activity’: Sinéad Morrissey’s Found Architecture and Self-Conscious Ecopoetics

In this article, I will closely read Northern Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey’s more recent work to articulate a ‘found architectural’ mode of poetic attention. Her intricately formal poetry explores its own potential as an ecopoesis or ‘housebuilding’, self-consciously addressing climate catastrophe in ironising domestic registers and typographies. I argue that poems like ‘Found Architecture’, ‘Meteor Shower’ and ‘The Italian Chapel’ foreground the limits and complications of human-made artifice in the context of the overwhelming threat of environmental collapse. In so doing, this article brings British and American ecocriticism by Jonathan Skinner, Margaret Ronda and Lynn Keller into conversation with scholars of contemporary Irish poetry to advance questions of temporality, human responsibility and the ‘adequacy’ of lyric response to crisis. This article illustrates the at-once generative and obliterative nature of Morrissey’s poetic forms, and their potential to sustain awareness of ever-worsening disaster while charting possible modes of artistic survival and salvage.